Sitting on the floor of his living room in Wythenshawe, still in his school uniform, he isn’t having any of it. Every time the social worker tries to find out how he’s feeling, he jumps up, pulls some homework out of his box to show us, changes the colour of his crayon, switches the TV channel, asks the officer to colour in a picture.

A couple of times he mentions that it’s his birthday in a few weeks and he’s going to see his gran. Then he clams up again.

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Danny is being monitored by social services because of his dad, a dangerous and violent sex offender banned from having contact with him. Over Christmas he managed to see him and give him a gift.

His mum – who has history as a perpetrator as well as a victim of domestic abuse – clearly cares about him, but is struggling with parenting. Police have been called lately to a drunken, violent bust-up with her latest partner. There are mental health problems, alcohol problems.

For half an hour the social worker keeps trying and for half an hour the five-year-old deploys impressive evasion tactics.

(Image: PA)

Eventually, the attempts still leading nowhere, he hovers by the TV and writes something in the dust: ‘Nana’.

Gran is the mother of his violent dad, and Danny isn’t daft. He knows his birthday wish may not pan out.

This is the sort of difficulty Manchester’s social workers are working with on a daily basis.

Hundreds of children like Danny are on their books, some of them in far more immediate peril than he is. Keeping them safe is a constant balancing act – trying to keep them with their parents or another relative, trying not to take the ultimate step of whisking them away into care, but being realistic about the risk.

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Most parents faced with a social worker on their doorstep expect the opposite.

“I’ve had parents think we get some kind of bonus for taking away their kids,” says duty social worker Sarah, back in the Wythenshawe office. Around half those she encounters for the first time are openly hostile.

“It’s everyone’s initial thought that it’s about taking their child. Probably 95pc of people think we are going to be taking away their kids.

“Actually no, nobody wants to do that. But sometimes there’s frankly nothing more you can do.”

If you want to really peer under the skin of a city, there are few better ways than to speak to a social worker.

Yet despite being the eyes and ears in the fight to keep Manchester’s children safe, this unseen army of council officials remains a bit of an enigma. Unlike policing, which whips past with blue lights flaring, cordons off crime scenes and generates hour upon hour of TV drama, social workers are buried in the national consciousness, save for a few tried-and-tested headlines.

There is the social worker in court for letting a child die. There are the social work departments with black marks against them for institutional failures – including, recently, Manchester’s. And there are brief supporting roles in the interview rooms of those policing dramas, or being haplessly dodged in episodes of Shameless.

That’s more or less it.

But these people see at least as much of the grime, pain and sadness lurking behind our closed doors as the police do, just without the blue lights. They, too, go out to dangerous situations in pairs, not knowing what they will find. And then they spend months or years trying to help parents and children pick up the pieces.

Manchester’s social services is a vast department with 5,000 children on its books, three times the size of next-door Salford.

Its Wythenshawe office alone employs hundreds of officers across a multitude of teams, covering the whole of south Manchester.

Social workers here agree domestic violence, coupled with drink – as in Danny’s case – is the single most common issue they deal with.

Other parts of the city present different crises.

North Manchester’s office in Harpurhey, the busiest in the city, is more likely to see kids falling prey to – or getting caught up in the fall-out from – gang warfare.

There are also multiple cases of violent corporal punishment within African families.

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Longsight’s central Manchester office has the most ethnically diverse mix of children on its patch and sees increasing numbers of kids coming across the council’s radar due to forced marriages, although on the day I’m there social services has been called out to a potential gangland shooting in Gorton.

“Even within Manchester it will vary,” says Sarah. “In Harpurhey the number of referrals is lot higher. It just highlights the deprivation across the city and the disparities.”

Director of Children’s Services Paul Marshall agrees: “It’s like three cities in one.”

Certain problems are prevalent across the board, however.

As more and more people become more aware of it, child abuse and sexual exploitation is a dark cloud hanging over hundreds of cases. On the day I’m at the Wythenshawe office two of the three live cases outlined to me involve potential sexual abuse, one by a neighbour of a teenager and one where police have traced child porn to an IP address in a house known to have children.

Sarah says the saddest case she was involved with involved two parents both with a history of child abuse.

“The worst case was where the guy was a serious offender and wasn’t allowed contact with under-16s, but had got an 18-year old care leaver pregnant. Both had been victims of sexual abuse themselves,” she recalls.

On that occasion, they did have to take extreme measures.

“We ended up removing the baby and it was just a real shame. She, though, was in love with him because she was a victim too. But he was a victim as well because he had a crap upbringing himself.”

Across the city, a rising tide of depression, self-harm and suicide among children is also engulfing social services, powered by inadequate mental health services, poverty, cheap drugs and the pressures of social media.

“We have seen an increase in emotional and behavioural problems in teenagers,” says another social worker, Vicky.

“We are seeing more referrals coming through where teenagers are using Spice, a lot of teenagers generally experimenting with that and other substances. There are definitely more than there were.

“And there’s a lot of referrals coming through regarding young people quite depressed about images and pressure from social media.

“It’s about self-image. You get a lot of teenage boys struggling with their identity.

“Girls see it with their physical attributes while boys feel pressure to perform. Then the parents struggle to parent that or manage it and that’s when they come to our attention.”

Sarah agrees. “We’re seeing more and more depression, self-harm and suicide among teenagers.

“At the same time services are decreasing, especially what child and adolescent mental health services can offer.”

When a council executive, clinical commissioner or a government minister takes a decision – a cut to this budget, a tweak to this legislation – often the ripples lap up against these doors.

Over the last few years women’s refuges in Manchester have dwindled, knotting together domestic abuse with destitution. Benefits and immigration rules have got tighter. Now homeless families, like teenage mental health problems, are increasingly coming across the desk of social services too.

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“We have not got as many refuges as we once had. The result is these kind of women may stay in a hotel and don’t get the support they need. So they are put in that difficult position.”

Social workers agree they are seeing more and more children in the kind of temporary accommodation highlighted by Shelter last year, kids growing up in bed and breakfasts – more than 1,000 housed in such institutions last year, double the year before.

But officers say they will do anything just to make sure they have a roof over their heads.

“In Wythenshawe we haven’t got the housing stock so often people will go to north Manchester,” says Sarah. “We’ll go anywhere just to make sure the family is safe.”

Lately officers have also seen a rise in the number of lone child refugees coming through its doors. The number in Manchester council’s care has nearly doubled since last August to around 50 and senior officers believe that number will keep rising.

They arrive at Manchester airport down the road, often through the official government transfer scheme because they have a connection to a friend or relative in the city.

(Image: PA)

It’s up to social services to work out whether that person is who they are meant to be – and whether they can safely look after the child. Social workers will go out until 1am, 2am, even 6am to make sure they are safe. Sometimes there is a debate over whether the Home Office or the council should provide an interpreter.

On the day I’m there, the Home Office isn’t answering the phone.

Other kids arrive by routes that are not immediately clear, or with an adult who needs to be checked out. Sometimes they just materialise as if by magic in the centre of the city.

Mostly they are teenage boys, says supervisor David, although some are ‘extremely vulnerable’ girls and others are severely disabled.

But the stories about men posing as children are largely a myth, say David and Vicky.

“It can happen that a young person says they are under 18 and we do our assessment and it turns out they’re not, but that’s very rare,” she says.

“We look at their history and schooling and ask questions about their upbringing.

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“They are extremely vulnerable kids who have been through trafficking and really significant trauma.”

“They are desperate to be reunited with their family. It’s very rare that they come in and their story doesn’t stack up. Some of these myths aren’t accurate.”

Social services in Manchester has not had the easiest of rides over the last couple of years.

As with departments elsewhere – Salford, Rochdale – problems in the department were only addressed when crisis hit, in this case when Ofsted ruled them inadequate in 2014.

Since then an almost entirely new management structure has been brought in. One senior officer says they have seen much more ‘political support’ since Ofsted, but admits improvements have not been easy and they have had to start from scratch to get the basics right.

It turns out that at one point there may have been some truth to the expectations of those parents fearful their children would be taken away.

The department had been taking too many kids into care by being over-cautious, says Director of Children’s Services Paul Marshall, who took over last year. There are now 70 fewer than there were this time last year.

“It seemed to be the right thing to do but it was the wrong thing to do, because you caused so many problems for the kids and their families,” he says, adding that others were simply not given the support they needed when they were younger.

“We are working hard with kids who frankly we should have done more with four or five years ago.”

More than 150 new social workers have been recruited since he took up post, having persuaded senior politicians of the urgent need for millions in extra funding a year ago.

Social workers ‘who were not right for the service’ have been encouraged to move on. Marshall now knows about every kid missing over 48 hours in the city and more than a dozen of the most senior cases.

Another senior manager says that while at one stage they were terrified about Ofsted coming back in, now they are no longer looking over their shoulder. Social work caseloads – while not quite where the department wants them to be – are now less than half of what they were.

A specialist team for disabled children that had been scrapped under a previous round of council cuts has been restored. An overlooked department intended to help the city’s most overlooked has crept back onto the desks of senior politicians.

Still, social work is a tough job. If care proceedings are taking place the next day, then that court paperwork has to be taken home. Officers spend long nights waiting in A&amp;Es with children waiting for medicals, sometimes until 6am. And it doesn’t always work out – on occasion those babies do need to be taken away.

“Sometimes there’s just no answer,” says Sarah.

“Those cases are very, very sad and you just can’t break that cycle. Unfortunately they get so angry with you but they are also so dependent on you. One day they’ll ring up and scream and shout at you and the next day they’ll ring asking you to do something for them.

“There’s these blurred boundaries.”

Not one official I speak to suggests throwing the towel in, but of learning to accept that sometimes the magic wand just doesn’t exist.

“I think every social worker would say the best part of the job is helping people and fixing things, but in reality it’s not always like that,” Sarah adds.